# Big strings => panic

Matthew Sanderson (m.sanderson@student.anu.edu.au)
Fri, 19 Apr 1996 13:58:38 PDT

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    >not without a lot of odd heuristics munged througout your code.  How do
    >you know if its a malloc panic from somebody creating a non-important
    >string which can be trashed versus some other possible (more
    >dangerous) problem?

    I don't know of any tasks commonly running on MOOs that, when killed, would
    wreak more havoc than a huge panic-dumped db and a MOO going down...?
    Your average MOO runs only a few utility tasks in my experience... nothing
    fatal if killed. Of course, someone'll prove me wrong here...
    Anyway, what's the difference between killing the task, and the MOO
    panicking, thus killing the MOO and all its tasks?
    Unless your task is doing something very important outside the MOO, which I
    find unlikely, I can't see the problem in killing it.

    >Sure you can simply kill any running tasks when a
    >panic is received, but that is just as bad (if not worse) in behaviour
    >than simply panic'ing and shutting down, and its not even guarantee'd to
    >solve the problem!

    How's it worse, for my knowledge? :)
    I think killing the task that's causing the panic, thus freeing the memory
    it was using, would solve the problem... no need to panic any more if
    you're no longer running out of memory.

    Matthew Sanderson
    m.sanderson@student.anu.edu.au
    The Australian National University, Canberra.

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